Leave your faint heart at the door as tonight sees the opening exhibition of London based artist/ illustrator Neal Fox’s latest body of work, Beware of the God, which has been reworked into stained glass form.
Applied almost exclusively to the windows of churches and other significant buildings, stained glass is a major form of pictorial art that has stood the test of time with many examples have remained substantially intact since the late Middle Ages. As the art form traditionally incorporates narratives from the bible and history, the method is highly iconoclastic through representations of the lives of saints, instruments of martyrdom and iconic motifs thus creating the perfect platform for Fox’s large-scale drawings developing into increasingly layered celebrations of the debauched and phantasmagoric characters whose ideas have helped shape our collective consciousness.
Working with traditional methods at the renowned Franz Mayer of Munich manufacturer, twelve pieces of Fox’s work have been produced, each measuring 2.5 meters in height. Fox plays with the symbolism of each character’s cult of personality; Albert Hoffman takes a psychedelic bicycle ride above the LSD molecule, J G Ballard dissects the world, surrounded by 20th Century imagery and the eroticism of the car crash, and Johnny Cash holds his inner demon in chains after a religious experience in Nickerjack cave.